FOCUS Oregon V2 I1

PageSpeed Insights
How do the websites of the PPA Board members stack up? Today I re-analyzed them all through
the new version of PageSpeed Insights (December 17, 2018) and compared them to the data from
September 2018. Using the same color coding as Google does to indicate “site health,” I have listed
them in no particular order in Fig. 2 below. According to Google, there’s some room for improvement.
With the changes in PageSpeed Insights , the desktop scores appear to have increased dramatically
while mobile scores have generally decreased.
Figure 2. Homepage PageSpeed Insight scores for PPA Board members’ websites in
no particular order. Data source: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/
insights
Web.dev
As a cautionary note, I
have also been tracking a
photographer’s website on
the Wix platform (Fig. 3).
This site did extremely well
in September 2018, but the
analysis today was dismal at
best. Without further analysis
using the Lighthouse tool, It
is difficult to explain why this
drastic change happened.
Needless to say, if you have a
website on Wix, please check
your own results as soon as
possible.
Figure 3. Homepage PageSpeed Insight scores for a photographer’s website on
Wix. Data source: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights
Finally, we come to the newest of Google’s website optimization offerings, Web.dev. It was launched
in mid-November 2018 and aims to help developers build modern capabilities into their websites and
apps. It contains two sections, “Learn” and “Measure,” both of which are broken down into manageable
categories. In the “Learn” section, you can explore “Fast load times” (note that this is listed first),
“Network resilience,” “Safe and secure,” Easily discoverable,” “Installable,” and “Accessible to all.”
In the “Measure” section, you have the opportunity to measure the performance of your website and
monitor your progress over time (with a Google account, of course). Measurements are performed using
the Lighthouse tool and are broken down into “Performance,” “Accessibility,” “Best Practices,” and
“SEO.”
The workflow comes next, and includes 1) “Audit your web page,” 2) “Analyze for improvements,”
and 3) “Learn how to fit it.” Once you plug in a URL, this tool will run Lighthouse and provide you
with a detailed listing of metrics for 1) performance, 2) progressive web app, 3) best practices, 4)
SEO, and 5) accessibility. If you have never heard of “progressive web apps,” don’t worry, you’re not
alone. PWA is basically a means by which an app or a website can be viewed and used while a device
is offline, allowing for a seamless experience even when the user is disconnected from the Internet.
If you’re running WordPress, as usual, there’s a plugin for it called, Super PWA.
Keep in mind that Web.dev is not for the faint of heart. It will give you an overwhelming amount of
data about your website. Do not try to fix everything all at once. Try to pick one or two of the most
important things to fix, and start there. You will never get perfect scores, but every little bit you can
improve will help your SEO.
Pingdom
One of the old standby website performance analysis tools is Pingdom from Solar Winds. You can
access the free version at https://tools.pingdom.com. Pingdom allows you to analyze your website
from seven locations around the world, so pick one that is closest to your server’s physical location and
your target audience. The free version is fairly limited and gives you four pieces of basic information
(Fig. 4):
The “performance grade” from Pingdom is basically
your website’s grade from YSlow and gives you a relative
measure of how you compare to other websites. YSlow
is based on Yahoo’s rules for high performance websites
and has been incorporated into both Pingdom and
GTMetrix. You can also install an extension for it in most
modern browsers (http://yslow.org). Pingdom’s “page
size” is simply a measure of how much data has to be
transmitted from the server to the browser. You want to
keep this as small as possible. The “load time” simply
Figure 4. Pingdom analysis of https://google.com
tells you how fast Pingdom was able to load your data
at your selected location. Finally, the “requests” tells
you how many times the browser had to request an “asset” (file, image, video, etc.) in order to
completely render the page. The more times the browser has to request an asset that requires
round-trip communication between the browser and the server, the slower your website will load.
It also makes a few limited suggestions to improve performance, but beyond that, you will get into
Pingdom’s paid service.
GTMetrix
GTMetrix is one of my favorite tools because of the amount of information it gives you about how
to improve your website. It also allows you to sign up for a free account from which you can run
regular reports on your website and compare your results over time. The folks at GTMetrix have also
provided several resource guides, including one for optimizing WordPress. GTMetrix gives you results
for both Google’s PageSpeed and Yahoo’s YSlow. However, Google has not updated the PageSpeed
Insights SDK in quite some time, so the version used by GTMetrix will yield different results than
Lighthouse. One of the great things about GTMetrix is that it ranks its recommendations in order of
priority. The biggest improvements in performance will come from this tool’s top recommendations.
12 • FOCUS OREGON
WINTER 2019 FOCUS OREGON • 13